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Pastry of the Year posted:I've been into comics pretty much my entire life and I've never seen a single issue of Shi, nor have I ever met anyone that has actually bought or even read it. I remember there being a bunch of ads for it in Wizard. I think I ended up assuming it was vaporware. in an early issue of Cartoonist Kayfabe, Ed Piskor cuts a promo about Shi and how there were so many ads for it in Wizard, Little Eddie thought that meant it must have been great and then when he eventually read it later in life it was awful
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May 22, 2019 14:57
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Edge & Christian posted:It was 2004, and she'd been a Famous Celebrity Democrat Supporter for decades at that point. She did anti-racism concerts with Harry Belafonte in the 1960s, supported [insert thing that asks women to be treated as humans/equals] for forty years, made it onto Nixon's Enemies list, etc. She'd been critical of the Bush administration but not more than a hundred other famous people, though she also committed the unique crimes of being successful singing songs that aren't for REAL MEN, she's got a BIG NOSE that definitely isn't symbolic of anything deeper, and also she's a woman over 40 and so she isn't even fuckable by Billy Tucci's standards (the next question in that Q&A is about who he finds the most fuckable). Something tells me he's really into Asian women. Edge & Christian posted:Even amongst Comicsgaters his online persona is psychotic.  dude needs help.
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May 22, 2019 15:02
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bessantj posted:Something tells me he's really into Asian women. quote:I’m very lucky (or should I say she is) because I married a nice little hottie myself. But? I’ll give this my best shot. Jessica Alba, Salma Hayek, Kelly Hu and Audrey Hepburn (when she was alive.) Oh, and that blue eyed chick from the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, you know, the one that just cut her hair.
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May 22, 2019 15:07
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Tucci seems like the kind of guy who watches the Purge series regularly and wishes he was right there with the purgers. I have no words for how much Ro’s tweets are making my skin crawl.
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May 22, 2019 15:25
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Alaois posted:in an early issue of Cartoonist Kayfabe, Ed Piskor cuts a promo about Shi and how there were so many ads for it in Wizard, Little Eddie thought that meant it must have been great and then when he eventually read it later in life it was awful I read a few issues of it, mostly due to how often Shi used to show up in crossovers (there are almost as many Shi crossover comics as there are comics with just her in it, going from the Wikipedia entry) and Wizard. It's a really weird book when Tucci is involved with it, because there's this whole push-pull undercurrent about Ana, the main character, trying to square her beliefs from her childhood Catholicism with her violent tendencies, because it turns out that going out at night in a weird kabuki outfit to murder a bunch of guys isn't something you can just do for a while then stop without consequence. It's almost an interesting concept, although I didn't realize at the time just how blatantly it was Frank Miller's Daredevil If He Was A Hot Japanese Lady Who Kills People. It's got the frequent '90s indie issue of having virtually no coherent reading order, though, plus there's this weird thing where, for a book about a woman who fights ninjas with no pants on, it's weirdly uncomfortable with sex as a concept. The main character is repressed as hell, and constantly caught in this odd self-loathing vicious cycle, so her infamous outfit is actively working against the typical themes of her stories. There isn't even the usual writer's dodge, IIRC, of trying to justify her pantslessness with "freedom of movement" or as a distraction tactic; the books just never actually talk about it. Ana might as well look at the reader and say "if I was wearing pants, nobody would be reading this."
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May 22, 2019 15:41
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That comparison doesn’t really make sense. Mark Millar is a real person and Ultimate Captain America is not, that version of Cap is a rather conservative rear end in a top hat, that doesn’t mean that the character reflects the political opinions of Millar.
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May 22, 2019 16:32
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As a fun fact, at the comic store I worked at we had an entire longbox full of the Shi/Cyblade one-shot that even marked down for a nickel wouldn't sell.
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May 22, 2019 16:33
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Oasx posted:that version of Cap is a rather conservative rear end in a top hat, that doesn’t mean that the character reflects the political opinions of Millar.  Oh boy.
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May 22, 2019 18:15
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:What’s the over/under on “Millar licks goats” being an actual insult versus a friendly jab? When it was written Ellis was covering for Millar on Ultimate Fantastic Four because Millar had dropped all his comics except Civil War on account of being close to death.
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May 22, 2019 18:27
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ryonguy posted:
https://mobile.twitter.com/mrmarkmillar/status/1131077022653067264
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May 22, 2019 18:48
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Apraxin posted:Are you thinking of Frank Miller? Millar’s a bit eclectic, but he’s mostly an old-school British leftist afaik. The thing is there's not really a ton of reason to assume he's being sincere. Like, every chance he's gotten to let his id out, he's used it to basically just write a bunch of horrifically misogynistic bullshit and talk about how great he thinks various permutations of assrape are. That isn't the profile of an old-school British leftist, that's the profile of basically a proto-Kekistani.
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May 22, 2019 19:17
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Mark Millar is also a longtime vocal supporter/advocate for David Icke and has a lot of other weird ideas both in his works and in stuff like getting super excited at seeing a black child with Down's Syndrome and having to ring his friends to let them know that not just white people can be 'mongoloids'. Still, he has consistently identified and been a vocal supporter for Labour as long as he's been in the public eye. People can have bad ideas without having all of the bad ideas. I'm also not convinced that the Ultimates' post-9/11 hawkish jingoism was 'ironic' or 'satire' in any meaningful way any more that all of Warren Ellis's fascist power fantasies were some sort of biting critique. You can yell "actually the Authority (and Spider Jerusalem, and Elijah Snow, and etc. etc. etc) were meant to be the baddies all along!" all you want, it's not any more convincing. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 19:26 on May 22, 2019 |
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May 22, 2019 19:24
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Edge & Christian posted:and in stuff like getting super excited at seeing a black child with Down's Syndrome and having to ring his friends to let them know that not just white people can be 'mongoloids'. Wait what
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May 22, 2019 19:29
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Green Intern posted:
Yeah a bit of staring too long into the abyss on that one
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May 22, 2019 19:55
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Yeah sorry, should have elaborated on ‘eclectic’: there’s a specific type of older British leftist (usually guys) who believe in social programs, nationalisation, the common brotherhood of humanity etc, and also have some incredibly contradictory and often just really loving weird ideas and personal beliefs that they have no problem sharing publicly. So Mark Millar is a Bennite socialist, pro-Scottish independence, pro-Brexit, Labour supporter who is anti-racist and also doesn’t see anything odd in being excited to find out Down’s Syndrome isn’t restricted to white people.
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May 22, 2019 19:59
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:Wait what I’m honestly surprised you haven’t seen that tidbit until now, here’s an article on it. http://4thletter.net/2010/04/dont-believe-the-hype/ “While down at the shops, I saw a black guy with [Down syndrome]. Amazing, as this is something my friends and I had queried for years. Is DS genetically localized to Caucasians. Yes, I’m now about to waste 20 mins phoning a couple of my pals to say so, but now me appetite has been whet and I’m curious if there are any Chinese or Indian Downs Syndrome people out there. Given that Scotland is almost entirely white my chances of seeing one here are slim, but I’m certainly on the look out now.” - Mark Millar
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May 22, 2019 20:24
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After reading that poo poo about The Unfunnies, I don't know if I want to know why Mark Millar is scoping out disabled folks. The odds are, of course, that he's just a big ol' weirdo. And yet.
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May 22, 2019 20:34
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Agent_grey posted:I’m honestly surprised you haven’t seen that tidbit until now, here’s an article on it. What the gently caress Mark Millar delenda est
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May 22, 2019 20:55
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I'm still pretty sure Millar is actually 13 years old still, it would explain pretty much everything
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May 22, 2019 21:35
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loving christ though, of course he's also a loving race science weirdo 
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May 22, 2019 21:47
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Edge & Christian posted:I'm also not convinced that the Ultimates' post-9/11 hawkish jingoism was 'ironic' or 'satire' in any meaningful way any more that all of Warren Ellis's fascist power fantasies were some sort of biting critique. You can yell "actually the Authority (and Spider Jerusalem, and Elijah Snow, and etc. etc. etc) were meant to be the baddies all along!" all you want, it's not any more convincing. "If you like it, it was good. If you don't, it's satire you don't get."
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May 22, 2019 22:51
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also "Spider Jerusalem is a fascist power fantasy" is... quite a take if anything he's a West Wing liberal power fantasy, the addition of a poo-yourself ray doesn't make him more fascist
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May 22, 2019 23:01
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And The Authority wasn't a fascist power fantasy either. Under Ellis I mean. Take a guess which goatlicker started that.
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May 22, 2019 23:06
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Pretty much all of Ellis's protagonists (and yes, I am including Spider Jerusalem and the Authority in this) have nothing but contempt for the masses and the common people. They're the heroes because the people they're up against are monstrous cartoon villains and the only bastard that can defeat the Big Powerful Boogeyman are even bigger Big Powerful Bastards that are going to do a lot less raping and corpsefucking and mass murder when they're in charge. Or if they're going to mass murder people, it'll be some bad guys who definitely deserve it. Maybe that's not fascist, depending on how you want to define terms. It's definitely a power fantasy with a definite anti-populist/democratic bent. You could argue that's inherent in pretty much all superhero power fantasies, but it's extra inherent in Ellis's turn of the century work.
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May 22, 2019 23:25
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I, uh Have you even actually read Transmet? Because you seem to have taken the polar opposite message from it that I did, basically Like, the more I think about it, it's basically "Chapo Trap House Saves the World"
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May 22, 2019 23:46
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I would argue that it is definitely "inherent in pretty much all superhero power fantasies," and Ellis is just honest about it.
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May 22, 2019 23:48
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Like, Spider thinks people are easily manipulated and capable of some real dumb poo poo, but also that they're fundamentally innocent because they're being manipulated so constantly. The entire thesis of his career, in-story, is that properly informing people of the truth, in plain English and without any shits given for  , will cause the problem to fix itself.In the comic, it works, as far as we can see. In real life, Chapo's been around for several years and... I mean, they own, but yeah we're not any closer to Full Communism
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May 22, 2019 23:50
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I don't think Transmetropolitan is particularly right leaning or anything, unless you want to say that by having a unique and prominent main character whose individual actions are important... but at a certain point you begin to make everything outside of Maoist Beijing opera into something fascist. It is not a useful term. If there is something that rings false there it is the prospect that the bad guys can get beaten just by a big scoop and expose.
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May 22, 2019 23:51
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Nessus posted:If there is something that rings false there it is the prospect that the bad guys can get beaten just by a big scoop and expose. Yeah, this is why I initially characterized it as a sort of Sorkin liberalism, and then as basically "Chapo Saves the Earth" (because that kind of liberalism usually sort of precludes stuff like the Chair Leg of Truth and poo poo-yourself rays, as being "not polite enough").
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May 22, 2019 23:57
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Edge & Christian posted:Pretty much all of Ellis's protagonists (and yes, I am including Spider Jerusalem and the Authority in this) have nothing but contempt for the masses and the common people. They're the heroes because the people they're up against are monstrous cartoon villains and the only bastard that can defeat the Big Powerful Boogeyman are even bigger Big Powerful Bastards that are going to do a lot less raping and corpsefucking and mass murder when they're in charge. Or if they're going to mass murder people, it'll be some bad guys who definitely deserve it. I think the bolded is pretty much inarguable, like, E&C is absolutely correct in that Ellis is very enamored with a certain counter-cultural elitism. I don't know if I'd call Ellis' philosophy of power fascist, but I would call it mostly incoherent with uncomfortable implications about hierarchy. This is also what I'd say about numerous aesthetic and cultural movements over the past 150-odd years that were not fascist (Theosophy, Imagism, Vorticism (I guess)) but which gradually offered a pipeline to the far-right. He's fascinated by and attracted to a lot of the things that fascism relies on people being fascinated and attracted by (I think this is true of Hickman as well) which is not to accuse him of being a full-throated fellow-traveler but which does, I think, mean approaching his work with a certain measure of caution. Also lmfao, Chapo Trap House? Really?
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May 23, 2019 00:01
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Archyduchess posted:Also lmfao, Chapo Trap House? Really? I mean I'm being somewhat reductive with the comparison, but the idea of speaking truth to power with a lot more gently caress-words than usual is common to both
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May 23, 2019 00:23
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When Mark Millar found out about the Spider-man child abuse PSA comic where Peter reveals to a victim of child abuse that he was molested by an older boy he trusted as a child, he reportedly spent the entire day going around the office laughing his rear end off about "Skip the kiddy-diddler" and talking about how hilarious it would be if the character came back to threaten to gently caress Spider-man in the rear end. Lurdiak fucked around with this message at 00:45 on May 23, 2019 |
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May 23, 2019 00:43
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Lurdiak posted:When Mark Millar found out about the Spider-man child abuse PSA comic where Peter reveals to a victim of child abuse that he was molested by an older boy he trusted as a child, he reportedly spent the entire day going around the office laughing his rear end off about "Skip the kiddy-diddler" and talking about how hilarious it would be if the character came back to threaten to gently caress Spider-man in the rear end.
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May 23, 2019 00:49
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You're gonna have to ask E&C for that one.
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May 23, 2019 00:58
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:Have you even actually read Transmet? Because you seem to have taken the polar opposite message from it that I did, basically Nessus posted:I don't think Transmetropolitan is particularly right leaning or anything, unless you want to say that by having a unique and prominent main character whose individual actions are important... but at a certain point you begin to make everything outside of Maoist Beijing opera into something fascist. It is not a useful term. Mek is a mostly forgotten Warren Ellis mini-series announced towards the end of the time that Ellis was writing Authority and Transmetropolitan, and like its rough contemporary Flex Mentallo feels to me like a neat encapsulation of where the author's head was at and what they were sort of groping at in longer works. It's a three issue series set in a Transmet-like cyberpunk city and is about Sarissa Leon, a trailblazing Mek (transhuman/cyborg/whatever bio-implants) activist. Sarissa went to Washington to try to become a legitimate pro-Cyborg activist and politician "working with the EFF, the ALCU, whole bunch of groups", arguing that the government shouldn't regulate Mek, only "Bad Mek", aka weaponized cyborg parts. When she returns to "Sky Road" to investigate the death of an old boyfriend, she finds all of her old friends are getting into the Bad Mek scene and calling her a poser and a sellout for not wanting free and unregulated weaponized Mek. They tell her that her boyfriend had gotten into Bad Mek, everyone had. She's told by the police that they're clandestinely allowing (and encouraging/pushing) Bad Mek on as many cyborgs a possible, to give them an excuse to go in and wipe out the entire Mek scene. Her boyfriend was opposed to the Bad Mek and was trying to stop people from getting it, so the police murdered him. She finds out her boyfriend was ratted out by the biggest Bad Mek dealer in the city, her other best friend from the Old Days. With this knowledge, she returns to Sky Road to ask the friend about it, and when he's evasive she murders his apprentice and plants the body in the friend's apartment. Then she calls the police and tells them to conduct their raid, then goes to confront her other friends. It turns out she had Bad Mek the whole time, and just starts murdering the poo poo out of people in the street, calling them children who can't possibly understand what Mek means. When called out by her old friend for having Bad Mek, she says quote:I'm rich and I'm important and I live in Washington DC. I have the right to be armed. Sky Road was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be good. As she breathes fire to destroy the friend's lab and stalks him through the alley, slowly dismembering him, she continues to monologue quote:I wanted a movement behind me, Eddie. I wanted to be someone. I wanted to get out of this place. I wanted something interesting here, sure. It wasn't supposed to change, you bastard. What was here had to stay good. And then she rips him in half and catches a plane back to Washington DC, wistful about the mass murder and martial law she helped enact. The end. Maybe, as Ellis likes to claim in interviews, Sarissa was supposed to be The Bad Guy all along, just like the Authority were meant to be the bad guys and every other troubling protagonist was secretly the bad guy and it's on you for cheering them on. Or maybe the undercurrent of "all you dumb commoners are stupid and destructive and need a Strong Daddy to Rule You" came out a little more obviously in Mek than the rest.
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May 23, 2019 01:06
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Lurdiak posted:When Mark Millar found out about the Spider-man child abuse PSA comic where Peter reveals to a victim of child abuse that he was molested by an older boy he trusted as a child, he reportedly spent the entire day going around the office laughing his rear end off about "Skip the kiddy-diddler" and talking about how hilarious it would be if the character came back to threaten to gently caress Spider-man in the rear end. He actually called the character The Buggernaut and have him threaten to gently caress the entire Marvel Universe in the rear end. Mark Millar posted:Skip must come back, but with a costume. I vote he calls himself THE BUGGERNAUT and tears his way through the asses of the entire Marvel Universe. What a crossover that would be. The SM/PPCA special is my all-time favourite comic. I was a kid when I read it and when Power Pack's hot babysitter demanded sex before they watched Star Wars it just seemed like a dream come true to me. I DEMANDED a babysitter like that!
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May 23, 2019 01:10
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I think I’ve seen that fanart
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May 23, 2019 01:20
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Edge & Christian posted:Pretty much all of Ellis's protagonists (and yes, I am including Spider Jerusalem and the Authority in this) have nothing but contempt for the masses and the common people. I read them as frustrated idealists who think the "common people" should be better than they are. Spider in particular gets along just fine with "normal people" throughout Transmetropolitan; he may complain or chew out a few, but the actual targets of his ire are politicians and manipulators. It's not contempt; it's often frustration, but when the rubber hits the road, they'll stand up in defense of those masses. There's a common thread throughout virtually all of Ellis's protagonists, particularly in his '90s work and later, where they're people who started off with some degree of good intentions and got that kicked out of them over the course of events prior to the start of the present story. Now they're embittered, but out to affect change via whatever methods are necessary, which typically involves short, sharp applications of violence because he's working in genre. It's particularly noticeable in Switchblade Honey, which is about as close to Ellis directly writing a protagonist manifesto as anything he's ever done.
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May 23, 2019 01:21
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Edge & Christian posted:Gonna have to call bullshit on this story, Lurdiak. I refuse to believe Mark Millar is a real person, and not the gestalt of every edgy 12 year old boy. You could tell me that he’s just 2 kids in a trench coat that just passes down the role to 2 other edgelord kids when the originals get too old, and I’d say “yeah, makes sense” this dude is pushing 50 
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May 23, 2019 02:07
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Please note that Transmet is very much a product of it's time, and while it had elements that are timeless (ie corrupt evil politicians) it shouldn't really be seen as pro fascist by today's standard. Transmet is anti authority in it's treatment of cops (corrupt) and very critical of big strong leaders willing to deal with minorities as scum. Look at Spider's admiration for the lower class and those forgotten by society for instance. A few issues were basically Spider talking about those at risk and how society pretends they don't exist.
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